There are no guarantees when travelling in the UK. Even in May the weather can be all over the place, beautiful, bright and sunny one minute, drab, grey and miserable the next.

There are no guarantees when travelling with a five month old baby. They can be bright and cheery and laughing one minute and crying and screaming the next.

Both of these things made my trip to the Lake District rather different to most of the travel I’ve ever done. Except when I travel with a tour group, I normally have a pretty relaxed schedule. That was more-or-less mandated this time!

Here is my entry for this weeks PhotoFriday challenge, “Grandeur.” For those that have been following the current series of The Apprentice, you’ll realise that this image represents English Sparkling Wine. In this case, I’ve stretched the concept even further. In the programme, it was a French word used to describe an English sparkling wine. Here, it’s a bottle of Italian, still wine. Never mind.

This is really starting to bug me. Nearly a week after Facebook’s IPO and the papers are still saying that it was a failure. It wasn’t, or at least, whether or not is was depends on who you are. And I suspect you prefer the winner to the so-called losers.

Let’s start with the basics. What is an IPO? It’s simple: a company sells a part of itself in exchange for cash. In the physical world, that’s the same as me making something and selling it to you. For the sake of this example, let’s say that I sell it to you for £1.

I’ve just been away for a week walking in the Lake District, so “Walk” should be the ideal PhotoFriday theme for me. Unfortunately I forgot my USB cable and can’t download my photographs. Instead, this is a picture from a walking holiday a couple of years ago in the south of Spain.

Please also vote for my picture in last weeks challenge, “Detailed.” I’m entry number 101.

My job means that I have to write detailed notes and designs just to keep all the moving parts in my head. “Detailed” is this weeks PhotoFriday challenge, so I think this image fits the bill.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Downward.” I’m entry number 121.

Blocking content from the Internet is getting a lot of press of late. The last couple of weeks has seen the Pirate Bay being blocked by a number of large ISPs and debate over whether the blocking of “adult” content should be opt-in or opt-out.

Unfortunately the enthusiasm to “protect the children” and “protect the copyright holders” seems to have pushed aside much of the debate of whether we should be doing this at all or whether it’s practical.

I don’t “get” many of the current entries to this weeks PhotoFriday challenge, “Downward,” so I thought I’d go for a very simple, very obvious interpretation of the theme. This is a view from the Eiffel Tower, looking downwards at the road below.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Portraiture.” I’m entry number 147.

As a new parent there is no way that I could interpret this weeks PhotoFriday challenge, “Portraiture,” to be anything other than a call for baby pictures.

Please vote for my photo in last weeks challenge, “Crimson.” I’m entry number 138.

Instapaper

• The save page bookmark works with Google Reader. That is, it saves the link I’m reading rather than the Google Reader web page.
• Page turn. Rather than display the page as a long, scrollable single page, Instapaper paginates the document. You can “turn” the page much as you do in iBook or the Kindle app.
• Progress indicators. I like that it shows roughly how long a document is and how much has been read.
• Clean, minimal interface.
• The trick of reading the current page to make site like NYTimes (with page view restrictions) or LWN (pay walls) is a great idea but not completely reliable.
• Recent updates have been less stable. Going from day to night mode — an otherwise nice idea — almost always crashes. Putting the app into the background often loses the current location (it returns to the end of an archived article).

Pocket

You’ve probably seen that it’s the Sinclair Spectrum’s thirtieth birthday today. There are lots of great retrospectives — this is probably the best single source I read — so I’m not going to rehash all that. But I thought it might be worth a few words of my own.

Like many Brits my age, the Spectrum was my first computer. Technically it was the family computer, but after a few weeks I was pretty much the only one who used it.